"The Best and the Brightest" Quotes

The best and the brightest of America’s young men went across the Pacific to Vietnam and left their reputations behind.

The flaw in the reasoning was in the belief that what had been a war of national liberation for the Vietnamese would become a war of Communist expansionism.

There was no bad faith on the part of Americans. They believed in their own sense of morality, they believed in the universal applicability of their own standards of morality.

The arrogance of power, the belief that America knew better than the Vietnamese what was good for them.

The American commitment to Vietnam had begun with a lie and ended with a lie.

The American decision to go into Vietnam was a classic illustration of the most dangerous of all strategic assumptions: that no matter what the cost, America could not afford to lose.

There was a certain kind of hubris in the American approach, the hubris of a country that believed it could do anything, solve any problem, win any war.

They had the best and the brightest, and they still could not prevail.

Vietnam was a war of perception, and in the end, the perceptions of the Vietnamese were more important than those of the Americans.

The tragedy of Vietnam was that the very men who had created the myth of American omnipotence had in turn become its victims.